Who out there wants to be a “deadbeat dad”? No takers? If you put aside the fact this insult is pleasantly alliterative and rather quaint, it is clearly not a good thing to be called.
When Harriet Harman used the term to urge the fathers of Britain to change more nappies last week she put the fear of god into them by pointing at Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory MP and father of six who has just admitted that, among other stone-aged attitudes, he does not see a dirty nappy as his problem.
For around 40 years, a readiness to change one has been a measure of the modern British man. In other words, since about the time it became a lot easier to do so. And for around two decades it has actually been up there with other macho-rated, but frankly routine, domestic duties, such as mowing the lawn or putting out the bins. As a result, it was no great shame on Philip May when he jokingly confessed to being under the thumb of his wife, the PM, on TV. He was, after all, a real man, prepared to tackle grubby bins on a weekly basis.
Harman, a pioneer of breastfeeding within the Palace of Westminster, clearly knows her changing bag from her Chiltern Hundreds, but she is wrong to see nappy skills as the true marker of a modern dad. Studies show that while in the early 1980s a whopping 40% of men never changed their baby, that figure is now vanishingly small. We have moved on, praise be, since the days when filmstars Tom Selleck and Steve Guttenberg could hope to appear adorably daft with a packet of Pampers in the 1987 hit Three Men and a Baby.
Today, it is pretty much only Rees-Mogg and Simon Cowell, that unlikely duo, who can tease the public with admissions of reactionary naughtiness. For most new fathers, such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who says he can process a baby bottom in 20 seconds, the job has simply joined the list of household chores they can do better than women, should they deign to focus. Sure enough, a recent supermarket survey judged that fathers were faster and more efficient at the task than mothers, because they apparently treat it “like a Formula One pitstop”.
As most parents of either gender understand only too well, the real domestic challenge lies in the less satisfying work of consistently tidying and planning ahead, let alone remembering to play with your baby. A commitment to the boring work of sorting washed socks would be my personal benchmark, but there are others, possibly like knowing without looking what is in the fridge at any given moment.
If the burden of regular nappy changing is not yet quite equally borne, it is not all men’s fault either. As the campaigner and father of three, Al Ferguson, has noted, few men’s loos are yet fitted with changing tables.
Nappies also remain, to a great extent, a class issue, as Rees-Mogg typically and helpfully highlighted when he said he did not believe that “Nanny” would approve of any attempt he might make at the job. It is possible that a nanny, rather than Mrs Rees-Mogg, is the real dab hand with the baby wipes in their home. If so, some might wish the nanny was closer to the levers of power than either parent.
